Comments on political violence, terrorism, small wars, etc.

al-Qaida

Welcome to your Situation Update, a new feature from Insurgentsia that runs weekday mornings. The scope of these posts will cover the globe’s various conflicts in the realm of irregular warfare (the term “irregular warfare” being like the word “irregardless,” i.e. nonsensical and overused).

The weather forecast this morning is overcast with a 20% chance of misdirected outrage. I hope that helps you wherever you are located as you read this.

President Trump wants a military parade modeled after the one on Bastille Day in France. The desire is apparently being taken as a presidential directive and is “being worked at the highest levels of the military.” On Twitter, people reacted with shock that the nation might consider fetishizing the military in a grand public spectacle unironically just days after the Super Bowl.

Public attention shifts from Syria despite nearly daily airstrikes on civilian-populated areas and massive death tolls. Over 80 people were killed on Tuesday in Syrian government air and artillery strikes. With little hope for a ceasefire, civilians wonder why they even try to film and report the human rights abuses they witness. To them, it seems the international community no longer cares.

And if that makes you depressed, don’t read this about Libya, where no plan to by the Trump Administration to bring stability to the nearly governmentless country means that Russia has decided to back its own horse in that race. After meeting with whom the U.S. recognizes as prime minister in December, the Trump administration has left Libyan affairs mostly up to the United Nations. Meanwhile, Russia has backed former general and strongman, Khalifa Haftar, including brokering weapons for oil deals and printing money for the Haftar-allied government.

Not so tranquil in the Maldives, known as a small but beautiful island country in South Asia, where the president appears to have issued a state of emergency and purged the supreme court and opposition.

New imagery shows Chinese development on reclaimed Islands in the South China Sea. China has long insisted the buildings were not for military purposes, but new photos show the runways, ships, and supporting buildings in new detail.

Turkish border towns feel repercussions from Syria campaign. Rockets and mortars from Syria’s Kurdish-held areas are not uncommon in Syrian border towns like Reyhanli. “This is happening every day now. I’m just waiting for it all to be over,” said a Turkish mother with her two children who were shopping for groceries while explosions thudded in the distance.

Meanwhile, France accuses Turkey and Iran of violating international law in Syria. The move is noteworthy because France and Turkey are both NATO allies. The Turkish foreign minister is on his way to Iran for talks about Syria’s future.

And Syria accuses Israel of airstrikes on government positions. There is a lot going on there.

The U.S. encourages NATO to establish long-term training mission in Iraq like the one it has had in Afghanistan for a decade. One senior NATO diplomat commented to Reuters, “This looks suspiciously like another Afghanistan. Few allies want that.”

Whoops, those tanks were ours. As many as nine American tanks provided to the Iraqi military ended up in the hands of Iran-backed militias says a new report.

Saudi living in Oklahoma arrested for al-Qaida ties. The man attended flight school in the United States and his fingerprints were found on an application to join al-Qaida from 2000 recovered in Afghanistan.

The VA motto is sexist says the head of the largest Iraq and Afghanistan veteran group. The motto, a quote from Lincoln, reads “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.” Today the VA must care for whoever shall have borne the battle, not just him.

This concludes your Situation Update. Questions may be posted in the comments section but answers are not forecasted. To receive these in your inbox daily, use the follow button on the sidebar (web) or below (mobile). Your next Situation Update will be Thursday, February 8th, 2018.

The New York Times reported Sunday that the C.I.A. broadened its Afghanistan mission from hunting al-Qaida and developing Afghan intelligence capability to fighting the Taliban. The piece explained the significance best:

“The C.I.A. has traditionally been resistant to an open-ended campaign against the Taliban, the primary militant group in Afghanistan, believing it was a waste of the agency’s time and money and would put officers at greater risk as they embark more frequently on missions.”

The CIA has a complex history in Afghanistan. From 1979 to 1989, it provided weapons and financial assistance to Islamic fighters with ties to Pakistan during Operation Cyclone. The program was portrayed in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks.

After the Islamic fighters, or mujahideen (literally those who commit jihad), defeated the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in 1992, the C.I.A. mostly abandoned the country until the 2001 invasion in retaliation for the al-Qaida terrorist attacks on September 11th.

With the help of a handful of special operations troops, the C.I.A. allied itself with a group of fighters in Afghanistan called “The Northern Alliance,” to overthrow the Taliban government. The Pakistan-backed Taliban took power in 1996 after a bloody civil war as a partial result of the C.I.A.’s involvement in the 1980s.

Then, the C.I.A. let the conventional military begin what has become known as the forever war: dozens of rotations of military officers and units fighting in 6-14 month deployments in Afghanistan with less than ideal continuity between them. After a decade and a half of this, with troop numbers ranging from a few thousand to 100 thousand, the Taliban implausibly controls more territory now than it has since 2001.

Afghan and U.S. soldiers on patrol in 2010 (DoD photo)

But now under the leadership of Director Mike Pompeo, the former Congressional Representative from Kansas, appointed by Trump, the C.I.A. is back in the Taliban fighting game.

Pompeo is not known for his wisdom or restraint. As a Congressman, he said many foolish things on national security. Whether he was making the point that saying the words “radical Islamic terrorism” was the key to our success overseas, or lying about the support of American Muslims for domestic terrorists, he developed a reputation for deplorable brashness.

Most recently, he was caught boldly lying about the agency’s conclusions on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and saying the C.I.A., shamed by revelations of torture in the past decade, should be “more vicious.”

So, the agency’s counter-terrorism direction under Pompeo may not come as a surprise to some. But it is important to understand that whether the C.I.A. kills more Taliban or not, clandestinely killing militants is not a strategy. The United States and Afghanistan governments both plan on fighting Taliban years from now.

If the U.S. wants to bring peace to Afghanistan — a prospect it pays lip service to, but there are few signs this is a true policy objective — the only way forward is via political settlement with the Taliban. Merely doing away with deadlines to signal to the Taliban that they cannot wait the U.S. out, as the top general in Afghanistan recently told NPR, will not work.

The U.S. cannot wait out the Taliban. Endlessly prolonging combat is not a strategy to defeat the Taliban, let alone bring peace to Afghanistan. Yet, the only public strategy from U.S. officials is: stay forever, kill terrorists (and Taliban). The Taliban are not considered terrorists under the State Departments Foreign Terrorist Organization list, but the distinction seems moot at the moment since they are getting the same treatment.

To bring peace to Afghanistan, the Taliban must be invited into the political process. They will not stop attacking coalition forces — whom they consider foreign “invaders” and “crusaders” — or the U.S.-backed government in Kabul until they have a political stake in it.

A model for this kind of absorption of an armed insurgency into the government as a political party exists in South Africa, Lebanon, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, among others. The Taliban is unlikely to come to the bargaining table while the C.I.A. are on patrols killing their fighters. After all, killing Afghan soldiers and C.I.A. officers has been much more effective for them so far.

Taliban control districts remain unchanged from last year, despite troop increases and heavier C.I.A. involvement. Additionally, Afghan soldiers and police are dying by the thousands. At least 6,785 Afghan soldiers and police died in 2016 and in 2017 casualties remain “shockingly high” according to the United Nations.

However badly the U.S. is performing in Afghanistan, its leaders — some elected by the American people, the rest appointed by those elected — continue to fight on aimlessly overseas. As the New York Times Editorial Board quoted retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich on Sunday, “A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America.”

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Islam does actually mean “submission” in Arabic so this meme creator imagines that covfefe is a coded anti-Muslim message.

After President Trump tweeted and then deleted a cryptic message early Wednesday morning, many took to Twitter to mock the apparent typo. With #covfefe trending, Trump supporters began defending the tweet. Evidently, if you add a space and an apostrophe, Google Translate will translate “cov fe’fe” as “I will stand up” in Arabic. I tried it myself:

Google Translate was set to Arabic for me automatically because despite its shortcomings, it’s a lot quicker than the Hans Wehr dictionary. Google thinks “cov fe’fe” is “سوف فقف” (sawfa faqif).

“Cov fe’fe” is not Arabic. If it was Arabic, I suspect Arabic speakers would have said something about Trump’s tweet pretty quickly. Nevertheless, Google Translate thinks it is. So Trump supporters took to Twitter to educate people about a language none of them spoke:

Cov fe'fe is "I will stand up" in Arabic. It was right after the bombing in Kabul.To quote a failed politician:"Delete your account." https://t.co/KFKybP4NZI

One Trump supporter did a write up explaining what his “God Emperor” meant by “I will stand up.”

Like I said, “cov fe’fe” is not Arabic. But as a former Arabic student, I was puzzled as to why it was translating “cov fe’fe” to “I will stand up.” “I will stand up” in Modern Standard Arabic is sa-aqaf or perhaps sawfa aqaf (the difference is the certainty of the future event, with sawfa indicating uncertainty).

So the translation for what Google thinks it is, sawfafaqif doesn’t make sense. But bad translations are normal for Google, it’s why it thinks fe’fe is faqif that interested me.

There is no standard transliteration (changing from one alphabet to another) from the Latin alphabet English uses to the Arabic alphabet, but Google thinking “cov fe’fe” was someone trying to write “سوف فقف” (again, sawfa faqif) seemed like quite a stretch to me.

So I did some digging into different Arabic dialects (I learned Modern Standard Arabic in school, the version of the language used officially versus colloquially).

Most Arabs only hear Modern Standard Arabic on the news.

If you’re into languages, this is was a fun puzzle to solve. If you’re not, things are about to get really boring so you might want to skip down to the paragraph above the last graphic.

First, Google transliterated“cov” into سوف (pronounced sawfa). If you go to Google Translate and input this alone, it doesn’t work, while sawfa translates to will.

Google does not think “cov” alone is Arabic.

But when you enter a second word, Google now thinks that “cov” is an Arabic word. For example, if you just type “cov fe” now Google will transliterate “cov” into سوف (sawfa) and fe into في (fi) which means “in”or “at” depending on context.

Add a second word, and Google thinks cov is Arabic.

So what’s with Google’s hesitance? I don’t know exactly how it’s been programmed, but obviously Google thinks the C in “cov” is now a soft C like in the word “cent.”At first I thought maybe this was because of Francophone Arab influence but in French a C before an O makes the hard C that sounds like a K.

Regardless, “cov” to sawfa isn’t too much of a stretch now. But what about fe’fe?

First of all, I don’t know why someone added an apostrophe into “covfefe.” It wasn’t there when Trump tweeted it. But when you add that and the space, Google thinks you are trying to transliterate فقف (faqif) and translates it all as “I will stand.”

But what is more confusing to me than “cov” to sawfa is “fe’fe” to faqif. Why does Google think that?

In Arabic, the letter ق (qaf), the middle letter in فقف (faqif) in is most commonly transliterated as Q. You have already seen this in words like Iraq or al-Qaida. Sometimes it’s transliterated as K like in the word Koran.

Less often, it’s transliterated as a G, like in the name of former Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi.

Nobody knew how to spell Gaddafi (DoD/Wikimedia Commons photo).

All three words and the name use the same letter in Arabic, but are represented differently in English. That’s why occasionally you will see Koran spelled Quran or Gaddafi spelled Qaddafi (there’s even more variants, but that’s because of other Arabic letters, not the one we’re focusing on).

Part of the reason for these different transliterations is because Arabic regional dialects pronounce the letters differently (think about how most Americans pronounce Rs versus how Bostonians do — Havard Yard versus Havahd Yahd).

In North Africa (like Gaddafi’s home Libya) and the Gulf, ق is often pronounced like an English G.

In Iraq and Kuwait, sometimes ق is even pronounced like an English J. This depends on your education and tribe and a lot of other neat things that influence the way we speak, but it was pretty confusing for me, who learned Modern Standard Arabic, when I was there.

The author posing for a cliche Baghdad palace picture in 2011.

Finally, in Egypt, the ق is often not pronounced like a consonant all! Instead, it’s a glottal stop — like the sound you make between the T and the N when you say “button.” Try it!

Confusingly, there already is another letter in Arabic that makes that same sound, ء (hamza). That letter is most often transliterated as an apostrophe. (There’s one of those letters in al-Qaida too, which is why it is sometimes written in English as al-Qa’ida).

So to bring this all together, Google has to figure out what Arabic dialect you are trying to speak when you write an Arabic word in the Latin alphabet into Google Translate and there are a lot of variations.

When you add the space into “covfefe” it makes it two words. When you add the apostrophe, Google thinks you are adding another letter that often makes a Q sound. Thus, “cov fe’fe” becomes sawfa faqif or a very bad translation of “I will stand up.” It’s not Arabic, but a well-meaning Google Translate thinks it is.

It gets a little confusing at the bottom because Arabic is read right to left. Also, Google transliterated V and F as the same Arabic letter.

There you have it. How one weird internet coincidence started yet another baseless conspiracy associated with the alt-right. Hopefully this one doesn’t lead to anyone to senseless violence, as they are wont to.

Umberto Eco said, “translation is the art of failure.” I’m not a fluent Arabic speaker and I haven’t traveled to all Arabic speaking countries. If you are or have and think I’ve gotten something wrong, please let me know in the comments.

Update: This post originally said Google thought “cov fe’fe’” was sawfa faqaf, but a native Arabic speaker has informed me faqaf is not an Arabic word in any dialect. The closet word would be faqif (so stand/stop) and this post has been updated to reflect that.

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House hunting in Duluth, Minnesota after 9/11 forced the author and his family to move (Nov 2001, photo provided by author)

By Eric ChandlerInsurgentsia guest contributor

I have an 8 mm video of my son. He’s just over eleven months old. He’s crawling around on the floor of my living room. He was kind of a fat baby. His chosen form of locomotion was to logroll around the house. We were living in South Ogden, Utah at the time. It was kind of a grayish carpet. In the background you can see the new entertainment center we bought to house our TV. Mission Style, when those kind of things mattered to me. Things like how many stars the restaurant had. What critics thought of the movie we were going to see. What kind of car we drove.

When I watch this video and see the TV on in the background, you can see one of the twin towers burning in New York City. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know why I was doing that. Why was I videotaping my son as he crawled around on the carpet during a disaster? I don’t remember doing it. Years went by and I was organizing our video tapes and looked through them to see what I had. I saw my son and there were the towers. When I looked through the lens and tried to imagine my thoughts, I drew a blank. I must’ve been in shock. Like someone who just got in a car accident and has a broken arm and doesn’t know it yet.

I don’t remember videotaping my son. I do remember that I was in the Mountain time zone when my dad in Maine called me and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was drinking coffee in my bathrobe. He said, “Turn on your television.”

I also remember my wife weeping in front of the tube. We were watching the people jump out of the World Trade Center and fall like horrifying confetti. She cursed at the screen. I was surprised at how angry she was through her tears.

They rarely, if ever, play video of the falling people on TV. In a world where nothing is forbidden, the restraint shown is remarkable. It isn’t WWII. Nobody today would hide the fact that FDR was in a wheelchair. They’ll show anything on TV.

They’ll show the money shot of the plane hitting the tower. Or a tower crumbling. But you won’t see much tape of people jumping. Somehow, we, the shameless, have arrived at a consensus. We look away.

Eric Chandler has written for Flying Magazine, Silent Sports Magazine, Northern Wilds, Minnesota Flyer, and Lake Country Journal and runs the blog Shmotown. Literary journals like Grey Sparrow Journal, The Talking Stick and Sleetmagazine.com have published his fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. He’s a member of Lake Superior Writers, an Active Member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, and an Associate Member of the Military Writers Guild.

He’s also an Air Force veteran with twenty years of experience flying the F-16. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enjoys cross country ski racing and marathon running. He lives with his wife and two children in Duluth, Minnesota.

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Once a Qaddafi stronghold, Sirte, Libya is now an IS stronghold and a target in a new U.S. air war (Christian Jacob Hansen/Danish Demining Group photo)

With the U.S. presidential election in less than 100 days, it is easy for news about the escalating war against al-Qaida, Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL), and other bad guys to get buried under headlines about what supposedly shocking thing Trump said about Muslims, babies, or Purple Heart medals. In case you missed it:

Non-special operations troops outside the wire in Iraq

In Iraq, non-special operations troops, i.e. what might be considered legitimate “boots on the ground”are conducting operations outside the confines of their bases in preparation for the invasion of Mosul. (“The boots on the ground have to be Iraqi” said President Obama once in 2014.) U.S. Army Combat Engineers are assisting an Iraqi engineer battalion build a pontoon bridge over the Tigris River.

American forces were completely withdrawn from Iraq in December, 2011, but today there are over 3,600 in country.

Jabhat al-Nusra rebrands

Jabhat al-Nusra (also know known as Nusra Front), al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, announced that it was changing its name to Jabhat Fath al-Sham (Front for the Conquest of the Levant). The name change in itself is interesting because Jabhat al-Nusra’s full name was Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahli al-Sham or “the front of support for the people of the Levant”—a decidedly soft and cuddly name for what was effectively al-Qaida in Syria.

The new name has more direct ambitions: the conquest of Sham. Sham is often translated as the Western concept of the Levant or a “greater Syria”. Already in actual conflict with IS, this now puts their name in conflict with IS too. IS was once the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham. The once-Nusra now wants to conquer that territory claimed by IS.

What interested most in the Western media about this rebranding, though, was the announcement that Jabhat Fath al-Sham would have “no affiliation to any external entity” which was interpreted as an official separation from al-Qaida proper. Many experts have argued that this is not the case, but the benefits of not being affiliated with al-Qaida are many—mostly foreign aid.

War against IS kicks off in earnest in Libya

Two days ago, a U.S. air campaign in support of the U.N.-backed government in Libya began against IS. I wrote about the first airstrike against IS in Libya a few months ago, but this most recent strike signifies a prolonged campaign specifically in support of the Government National Accord, one of three government-like entities currently operating in Libya.

This new campaign against IS is authorized under the 2001 AUMF. Yes, a war in Libya is legal under a law passed to fight al-Qaida in Afghanistan a decade and a half ago. A new, revised authorization from Congress to fight what is effectively a new war is not likely.

Afghan forces use child soldiers but the US is okay with that

This one is not exactly news, but Foreign Policy published a piece today about the Afghan National Police’s use of what are effectively child soldiers. This makes for cute propaganda pieces about 10 year old “heroes” fighting the Taliban, but it is also in violation of the spirit of a law preventing the U.S. from arming or assisting countries that use child soldiers.

The Obama Administration argues that a child police officer is not a child soldier, but in Afghanistan the National Police do not do traditional police work like investigating crimes, they fight the Taliban. But using technicalities to not enforce laws protecting children is not new for the U.S. After all, the U.S. is one of only three countries (joining Somalia and South Sudan) that will not ratify the U.N. child rights treaty.

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Exactly five years ago last Monday, United States Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden during a raid on the compound where he lived with his family in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

I remember where I was when I heard Bin Laden was dead: in the open bay, cinderblock barracks at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, during mobilization training for a deployment with the Oklahoma Army National Guard. The mood then among fellow soldiers was mostly surprise and perhaps a little incredulity — after all, there was no evidence of a body. Junior enlisted soldiers are, by nature, suspicious creatures.

It took almost ten years after the Bin Laden-directed attacks on September 11th, 2001 in the United States, but on the evening of May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama told the world during a televised address from the White House, “After a firefight, [a small team of Americans] killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

“Looking at al-Qaida’s position in the world today versus in 2011, it is hard to make a good argument that killing Bin Laden worked.”

According to President Obama himself during that very address, the killing or capture of Bin Laden was, until then, the top priority of the war against al-Qaida. But for all the resources that went into Bin Laden’s killing, did, as President Obama put it, “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaida” actually disrupt, dismantle or defeat it?

Looking at al-Qaida’s position in the world today versus in 2011, it is hard to make a good argument that killing Bin Laden worked. In 2011, al-Qaida’s core in Pakistan was suffering from seemingly endless drone strikes, disrupted communications, constant threat of infiltration, and the inability to meet in large groups. Killing Bin Laden did not much change the operational ability of al-Qaida’s core.

However, pre-Bin Laden raid, al-Qaida’s affiliated groups in Africa and the Middle East, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) were much less active.

Since the horrific car bombing in Algiers in 2007 that killed and wounded 180 people, AQIM attacks had essentially dropped off, with no AQIM-attributed casualties in 2008 or 2010 and only 12 in 2009. But after Bin Laden’s death, attacks saw an uptick, with casualties increasing every year, culminating in two large attacks this year using gunmen in Burkina Fasso and Ivory Coast, resulting in 100 casualties — relatively high for attacks not using explosives and a marked expansion from their Algeria-centric operations prior to Bin Laden’s death.

AQAP has seen tremendous growth in the past five years. In 2009, AQAP was estimated to have only 200-300 members, but grew to nearly 1000 in 2014. Because of the Saudi-backed war in Yemen against Iranian Houthi rebels, AQAP has been able to consolidate its power, enjoying the control of a mini-state along the Yemeni coast, much like the quasi-state under the control of Islamic State (IS, also called ISIS or ISIL) in Iraq and Syria.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) fighters in the Algerian desert. The stones spell “La ilaha ila Allah (There is no god but God)” (Voice of America photo)

Another al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra (also known as Nusra Front or Nusra), did not exist before Bin Laden’s death. But after the start of the Syrian Civil War, Nusra began operating as the official arm of al-Qaida in Syria with the blessing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then-leader of the Iraqi affiliate, AQI. Since its formation, Nusra has become one of the strongest and most organized rebel groups in Syria, second only to IS.

IS itself was once the al-Qaida affiliate in Iraq and then known as AQI. During the time of the Bin Laden raid, AQI was nearly defeated. But the death of Bin Laden, the civil war in Syria, and the withdrawal of American troops combined with an extremely weak government in Iraq created ideal conditions for AQI/IS to seize control of large swaths of territory in both Iraq and Syria. While not affiliated with al-Qaida anymore (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has eclipsed al-Qaida’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and perhaps even Bin Laden), IS is certainly more powerful than al-Qaida ever was — before or after Bin Laden.

“The US and its partners must, at a minimum, work harder to quantify the results of their counterterrorism strategies and end the practices that are counterproductive.”

So, if al-Qaida and global jihadism have only become stronger since the death of Bin Laden, it is fair to say that killing Bin Laden was a poor top priority for the United States in its war against al-Qaida. This does not come as a surprise to all. In 2008, Aaron Manness published a study which found that decapitation strategy is not only limited in efficacy, but may actually be counterproductive when used on religiously motivated terrorist groups, who have been found to become more violent when their leaders are killed.

One could theorize that Bin Laden would have been more useful captured alive, but the point is now moot. His death, once the top priority of the US, has done nothing to defeat al-Qaida. Indeed, al-Qaida’s greatest foe today may not even be the US, but rather IS, who is competing with (and for the moment, winning against) al-Qaida to be the world’s premiere Salafi jihadist group.

Should the US defeat either IS or al-Qaida by killing its members, the other will directly benefit. If decapitation strategy does not work, the US and its partners must, at a minimum, work harder to quantify the results of their counterterrorism strategies and end the practices that are counterproductive. The killing of Bin Laden was only one of hundreds of “high value targets” that have been killed in countries the US is not technically at war with — to unimpressive results. Next, the US and its partners must identify a strategy that does not benefit al-Qaida while IS is degraded or vice versa. If they do not, this 15 year old war is not likely to end any time soon.

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Last week the United States celebrated its 14th New Year in Afghanistan, making it the longest war in which the US has fought. While 2015 was technically the first year Americans were no longer engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, 22 US military members lost their lives including six US Air Force personnel on December 22nd. In addition to the US military fatalities, another five coalition military personnel perished and more contractors — who outnumber US troops three to one — but for them no official numbers are kept.

This is the year the US war in Afghanistan was planned to end. The 9,800 troops in country were intended to be cut in half by the end of 2015 with a slow withdrawal of the remainder by the end of 2016 (much like the Iraq withdrawal.) But there were some . . . issues with the Iraq withdrawal and the security situation in Afghanistan is the worst it has been since 2001. Even in Kabul, it is too dangerous for the State Department to drive from the Embassy to the airport.

The grimdark reality of Afghanistan in 2016 is that the last decade and a half has been mostly a wash.

So instead, at least 5,500 troops will remain in Afghanistan through the end of the Obama presidency where the next administration will decide how to proceed with the war that the US has been fighting since Carson Daly hosted MTV’s Total Request Live.

The grimdark reality of Afghanistan in 2016 is that the last decade and a half has been mostly a wash. Despite the $685 billion spent, over 3,500 US and coalition troops killed, and perhaps 200,000 Afghan civilians killed, the Taliban controls more territory in Afghanistan today than they have since the 2001 invasion.

Unfortunately, as 2016 rolls in the Taliban is not the only failed American objective in Afghanistan. Even al-Qaida is enjoying a resurgence. In October of last year, “probably the largest” AQ training camp was destroyed in Kandahar province. One spanned over 30 square miles — roughly three times the size of the largest US base in Afghanistan, Bagram Airfield (though much less populated.)

Looking forward, 2016 will be another challenging year for US forces in Afghanistan. 2015 brought a large, but mostly unsuccessful offensive from the Taliban that allowed them to briefly control Kunduz. They did not manage to capture any more city centers, but 2015’s warm winter has prevented a traditional lull in the fighting season. Only a week into 2016, the US has found itself in a “combat situation” once again in Marjah, with one Army Special Forces soldier killed and two others injured.

It is clear that as US and coalition partners reduce their military presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban, AQ, and other unfriendly actors will fill the power vacuum in place of the Afghan government. It also seems unlikely that the Obama administration will commit more troops to a war it pledged to end.

I do not anticipate the state of Afghanistan in 2016 to become more secure — and it is not foreseeable that the US will find an endpoint to its counterterrorism mission this year. Unfortunately for the people of Afghanistan, it will probably be 2017 before any meaningful policy shift in either direction occurs from the United States. For now, Afghanistan will continue to exist in a strange state of non-war where American combat operations do not occur but combat situations do.

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The internet’s role in changing 20th century political norms is well known, especially since 2011’s Arab Spring movement and social media’s huge role in it. But it is not just social media that is supporting radical change. In 2014 the most Googled “recipe” in Ukraine was for Molotov cocktails (beating Easter bread, homemade pizza, and “Vyshyvanka cake.”)

What did Google point these inquiring Ukrainians to? Answer: A Wikipedia article in Russian about Molotov cocktails.

As a millennial I naively wonder, “How was this knowledge passed around before the internet?” Encyclopedia Britannica doesn’t have an entry for Molotov cocktails. In the 1990s it seemed like you could find things like this in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, but that was still online. Said Cookbook’s only publisher stopped publishing it because they had a “responsibility to the public.” Ironically, Wikipedia’s priorities are more populist by disseminating information on how to make homemade incendiaries.

Like all discussions about the internet, it poses the question, “What did we ever do without it?” Obviously, political violence, insurgencies, and revolutions existed before the internet, but can they exist without it now? Al Qaeda infamously eschews digital communication in favor of couriers, but they have been completely eclipsed by Islamic State as the premiere jihadist movement in the world. And IS has no qualms about using the internet to promote their ideology. Their media arm frequently posts polished videos to YouTube of their human rights abuses (I won’t post a link here) leading to incredibly successful recruitment around the world. Even the music, radio, and television hating Taliban has trolled ISAF on Twitter.

Somehow we have reached a point in history where jihadist message boards have become passé (they’re so 2000s.) That’s political violence in the Information Age.

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Today, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said that the fight against the Islamic State could take decades. This is hardly an unreasonable assertion considering our war against al-Qaida is now thirteen years old. (I was sixteen on September 11th and am now twenty-nine. There are high schoolers alive today who have no memory of a United States at peace.) New, yet to be named operations in Iraq and Syria do not show signs of a speedy resolution. After all, it might take a year to train the Iraqi Security Forces to a readiness level suitable to start a ground campaign against IS. (I expect that estimate is optimistic—coalition forces trained the ISF for at least seven years, but it did not prevent the ISF from collapsing against IS earlier this year.)

Panetta goes on to blame President Obama for not forcing former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Iraqi government in 2011 to accept a new Status of Forces Agreement with diplomatic immunity for US forces. In his view, the absence of this hypothetical SOFA and continued troop presence created a security vacuum and thus IS—a position shared by Senator John McCain and the GOP as well. This sort of cognitive dissonance concerning the recent origins of unrest in the “Greater Middle East” aside, there are a few troubling points within his statements.

1. We are fast approaching the longest war in US history—one that spans continents and has no end in sight. In just seven years we will be fighting AQ and its associates/separatists for as long as we were fighting communists in Vietnam (“advisor years” included). As the Vietnam War could be considered the US’s most embarrassing foreign policy blunder (or more accurately string of blunders), why is our Department of Defense not a learning institution?

2. Panetta complained that Obama “relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.” How do we live in a world where a leader in the US government’s highest offices (Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, etc.) can claim that logic is a lesser trait than passion? It continues to astonish me that we allow our elected and appointed leaders to make these sophomoric emotional statements.

3. To what end do we accept that this war will take decades? After IS is degraded and destroyed—then what? Shall we keep US forces in the Middle East indefinitely, fighting the next armed group who opposes imperialism? Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war to prevent this scenario. It is not within the American people’s strategic interests to remain there. The question should not be, “What is the most recent action by a US administration that led to the strengthening of IS,” the question should be, “How did we end up here in the first place,” and, “How do we avoid doing it again?”

I admit I do not have the answers to these questions. But the US has a long history of addressing the symptoms and not the root cause of its problems. This part of Obama’s address to the American people about this still unnamed operation in Iraq and Syria is telling:

“I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.”

If Yemen and Somalia are our measure of success, I am positive we will continue to be successful in Iraq and Syria.